


Pilgrim’s Progress

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, Essays, Gen, Meta, Watson's Woes July Writing Prompts 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 21:31:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4495452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These are the days of miracle and wonder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pilgrim’s Progress

**Author's Note:**

> For the July 2015 Watson's Woes Promptfest Amnesty Prompt #10 _, **Memory Lane.** Let this entry be about what came before:  anything that happened in the past, something from childhood, a prequel, or even about the side characters prior to a case._ Warning: I got meta.

It’s weird to think that I’ve been a fan of Sherlock Holmes since before Benedict Cumberbatch was _born_. But it’s even weirder to realize that my 92-year-old dad – a bit teetery these days but still upright – was reading Sherlock Holmes before Arthur Conan Doyle DIED. He went to the Basil Rathbone films when they were first in the theaters. He’s probably the reason there were Sherlock Holmes books represented in the library that was our house.  
  
I wasn’t born with a deerstalker on, of course. It was a gradual process.  
  
Up until 1972 my knowledge consisted of knowing about that guy with the pipe and the magnifying glass and the funny hat, and the idiot sidekick, and recognizing the silhouette.  
  
In 1972 one of the stories in my fifth-grade reader included “The Red-Headed League” and I realized just how well these were written, how smart Holmes was, and what a clever idea for a crime. I may have read one or two other stories after that.  
  
But my watershed year was 1977 – when I read _The Seven Percent Solution_ by Nicholas Meyer (and thought it was one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories) – and my overall reaction was “… Oh my  God. These two men love each other so much.” It was _Seven Percent Solution_ that changed me from someone who knew about Sherlock Holmes to a Sherlockian. (Much later, I’m embarrassed to say, I finally figured out that it was a new story written by a contemporary – but how appropriate that fanfiction was what brought me to Baker Street for good and all!) The movie made at that time also had one of the best (and sexiest) Watsons ever put on screen – Robert Duvall – a film that made me realize that I liked and admired Holmes, but – like Holmes – I adored Watson.  
  
(How appropriate that Nicholas Meyer, who came up with an alternative explanation for Holmes’ “death” and disappearance in _Solution_ , directed the Star Trek film in which Spock “died” – _Wrath of Khan_. Especially as it’s now ST Canon that one of Spock’s human ancestors was indeed Sherlock Holmes.)  
  
One very indelible signpost in my fandom progress was the summer in 1978 when my family camped in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, a dark and damp rain-forest – which was the time and the place where my 15-year-old self read _Hound of the Baskervilles_ for the first time.  
  
Then came 1981, and Granada and Jeremy Brett and David (sigh) Burke and _A Scandal in Bohemia_ , and I was lost. I remember how I devoured those episodes in the days when Vincent Price hosted PBS Mystery, before he voiced the villainous ~~Moriarty~~ Ratigan for Disney’s _Great Mouse Detective_. Most especially I remember the agony of waiting, one year to the next, 1982 to 1983 to 1984, for the next 6-episode installment. I was heartbroken when David Burke left after _Final Problem_ and was firmly resolved to dislike his replacement; but Edward Hardwicke won me over with a spectacular faint in _Empty House_ , and I grew to love the magnificent chemistry between Brett and Hardwicke for the rest of the series. (I was in England in 1995 when Jeremy Brett died; I visited Sir Arthur’s grave in Minstead two days later, and two days after that I huddled with other mourning tourists outside 221b Baker Street in London like a shiva call.)  
  
Other versions cropped up about this time too – the Russian films, the BBC Radio dramatization of the complete canon, Spielberg’s _Young Sherlock Holmes_ , Disney’s _Great Mouse Detective,_ the genderswapped modern-punk graphic novel _Baker Street._ These were also the days before the Internet, however, so there was very little about any of these – since paper-zine making was expensive and fans really couldn’t afford to publish a lot of fanfic from small-fandom sources. (“We wrote our stories on stone tablets and had to hand-carry them if others wanted to read them…”)  
  
There was a little Holmes fanfiction in the 1990s, based on Granada – additions to multi-fandom zines, a very few dedicated zines – but often it was derided because of “those two ugly old guys” (one fan’s response to a request to contribute to a zine).  
  
And then I watched two fandom-bombs that hit this latest generation of Sherlock Holmes fans within a year of each other -  Guy Ritchie’s December 2009 film and _Sherlock_ debuting on BBC in 2010 (and on PBS Mystery in 2011). Ritchie’s casting choice of Jude Law for Watson did a lot to re-program the general public’s view of Watson away from Nigel Bruce’s indelible bumbling elderly comic relief that had so degraded Watson's image that the venerable British magazine _Punch_ ran a poem lamenting Watson's buffooning. And BBC’s offering not only brought Sherlock Holmes into the world of Starbucks and cellphones (i.e., modern London) but turned Benedict Cumberbatch into this generation’s Basil Rathbone (and the prior generation’s William Gillette).  
  
And now?  
  
These days we live amid an embarrassment of riches. The modernization of Holmes has always been a thing – Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes fought Nazis and drove 1930s roadsters – and versions like network TV’s _House_ and _Elementary,_ the comic book _Watson and Holmes,_ and the web series _S(her)lock_ continue to rewrite how the stories are told and how the characters are portrayed. Cumberbatch’s masterful misanthrope goes back to Brett and Rathbone; Jonny Lee Miller’s frail addict echoes Hugh Laurie’s House and Nicol Williamson’s Holmes in _Seven Percent Solution_. But the biggest changes have been in how Watson has been reclaimed from the source material; Jude Law’s and Martin Freeman’s stalwart soldier Watsons are like Robert Duvall’s before them – and Lucy Liu’s Watson has ascended not only to become a fellow consulting detective, Sherlock’s partner rather than his assistant, but to be a Watson who defeats Moriarty when Holmes cannot.  
  
Another movie has just opened (Ian McKellen taking Holmes into his twilight years), and new books and stories spring up like dandelions with no signs of slowing. And those are just the official sources – fanfiction and fanart online blooms like algae.  
  
For an old Sherlock Holmes fan (in both senses of the word, thank you), it’s a joy for me to see one of the very oldest fandoms – a fandom just as obsessed and crazy in the days before my dad was born – become the latest thing, and to continue to gain new enthusiasts every year.  
  
And a fandom which continues to inspire me to exhaust myself every July, writing half a novel’s worth of words strictly out of my love for two fictional people in a place in London that never existed.  
  
As the Holmes actor Reginald Kincaid (Michael Caine) says to his Doylesque Watson (Ben Kingsley) in _Without a Clue_ : “I was once a figment of your imagination. But now Sherlock Holmes belongs to the whole world.”


End file.
